Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

We were using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for micro-segmentation with Zero Trust. It's a process-level segmentation that functions just like a firewall.

It has significantly lowered our overall security risk and made our security much better. We don't need to buy additional solutions for it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is very intuitive. If you're used to firewalls, you're also used to this product because it has the same look and feel.

Automation is a nice feature that not many customers are using. Companies can set up automation so that if they see something that's not good, it can be automatically remediated. That's a feature that many customers would like.

The visibility feature is actually where this technology is much better than firewalls. With firewalls you make policy, but you don't know why you're making the policy because you need to ask somebody about what kind of policy they need. With Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, you can actually see what's going on and you can make your policy without asking any application owner what to make. You're actually accepting a policy instead of building a policy.

What we hear most from customers is that it requires a kernel module. Many customers do not like kernel modules because the PCs will blue screen if there's a bug in the software. That's the biggest disadvantage. Some competitors are not using kernel modules.

We have been using it for four years.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is stable. There could be some minor bugs, but there haven't been any major issues for the last four or five years.

It's scalable. There are customers that have 250,000 endpoints and PCs.

The support cases I've had were good.

I'm no longer working with previous solutions.

It's pretty easy to install.

We are not a partner, so we're more of a customer.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is very flexible. You don't need to change anything in the network because it's not a network thing. That's the nicest thing.

The setup cost is reasonable.

Illumio is the biggest competitor. They are not using a kernel module. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has much better visibility and has a more firewall style look and feel in how you use the product compared to Illumio.

I work with the segmentation aspect of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has much better visibility and has a more firewall style look and feel in how you use the product. I would rate this review an 8 overall.

My main use case for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is related to Kubernetes instrumentation and visibility, although it is difficult to specify a main use case. When I work with Kubernetes, it is a very dynamic environment where we have pods that are going up and down all the time, and most of the customers don't have visibility about how those pods communicate between themselves or what type of service they consume outside.

By doing instrumentation in Kubernetes, which I have done already, even in OpenShift for on-premise environments and also on Azure, we are able to see all the pods that go up and down and all the communication that they establish inside the pod and outside the Kubernetes environment.

Besides the visibility that I have mentioned about my use case with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, we can also create rules. If we think that one specific namespace should not communicate with another namespace, we are able to create rules on Guardicore to avoid that communication, or not necessarily only from one namespace to the other, but from one specific port from the source to one specific port to the target, so we can also build those types of rules, and that really helps improve security for customers.

In general, I would say that the best features that Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers include visibility and the ability to have Layer 7 visibility, which means that we are not only looking for source IPs and ports and target source target IPs and ports, but we are also looking for services. We are able to see even the service that we can create rules for, allowing from server A one specific service to communicate with server B, but if some other service tries to do that communication, it will be blocked, making that a great feature of Guardicore segmentation. There is also the deception model they have, which is the Honeypot model. Once we have one rule that is blocked for some specific ports, we can intercept an insider threat that tries to do RDP to one server that should not happen. With the deception model, that communication is blocked, and the insider is sent to a Honeypot server where they think they have established that communication and may try to add some script there. Guardicore adds logs and creates an incident, so we can see what that communication has done and how someone tried to compromise the environment.

After implementing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, I can say that for most customers with whom we implement Guardicore, we see once we do micro-segmentation for an application that the connection—possible connections that can be established on that application—usually drops by 80%. If we map out the proper communications that one application should have and create rules to apply the proper blocking, we see one application that could have a hundred thousand different types of communications, and after micro-segmentation, it can have only twenty thousand, thereby significantly increasing the security posture.

In day-to-day operations, we usually don't have any impact, which is the idea of Guardicore. Once we have the rules in place, we only allow the communication that is supposed to happen. This is why we increase the security posture, but we don't impact applications usability and anything else. For day-to-day operation and risk management, as I have mentioned, we typically reduce the communications that we can have with a specific application, so if a customer's environment is compromised, usually we can guarantee that with Guardicore segmentation, if we have the proper rules in place, other applications will not be compromised, and the communication will stay only inside that specific application.

Reporting is one area where I think Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can be improved. They are working on it, but as of now, that is the aspect that needs enhancement. Nothing specific comes to mind regarding the needed improvements related to integrations, scalability, or user interface.

I have been using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for four or more years.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is stable.

The scalability of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is pretty good; whenever we need more resources for management, if a customer's environment increases significantly, they can add more nodes to the manager within a 15-minute downtime, and it works well.

If I have to rate customer support from 1 to 10, I would give them a six or seven.

I have not previously used a different solution. I know other solutions, but I have worked only with Guardicore.

Regarding pricing and setup cost, I don't have information because I am from a consulting team and not from the sales team. The licensing is related to the number of assets that the customer has in the environment where they want to install the Guardicore agent.

As I mentioned, being a consultant and my company being a partner with Guardicore, we decided to go with Guardicore after evaluating options such as Illumio, which we found to be less robust compared to Guardicore.

With usability, I find that Guardicore is a pretty easy solution to use and pretty straightforward. For integrations, they have lots of different integrations. One cool integration that I have already done is with the Tenable solution, from where we are able to get not only assets information but also assets with high exploitable vulnerabilities. With Guardicore working with labels, we can create a rule that whenever we have an asset with a high exploitable vulnerability, we can block some specific type of communication inside the environment. That integration is one of the coolest I have done, but Guardicore has a lot of different integrations that I know about. As for reporting, Guardicore doesn't have nice reporting inside the solution itself, while it gives lots of different APIs where we can pull the data and build external reports, such as on Power BI. In my company, we have done that, but the reporting is not native from the solution; we have to use APIs for those types of reports.

My advice for others looking into using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is to think about labeling. You should have labels for your entire environment regarding applications, which means having a good CMDB. You don't need to have a full CMDB, but you should at least build one with information about servers and which applications those servers are members of and what roles they play in the applications, so with that, you will be able to extract the best from the solution. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

I usually recommend Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for larger companies, as we started to work with Guardicore before the acquisition and then moved to distribute Akamai. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is not a simple solution for the Italian market because we are suffering from nanism; the majority of our companies have under 1,000 employees. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is enterprise software, but they are pretty good in that area.

It is more suitable for bigger companies. The reasons are not solely about pricing; it is also about the knowledge of the security manager in companies across Italy. For example, a small company with 500 employees might have a limited budget for cybersecurity and typically does not consider micro-segmentation as a primary solution. They may manage cybersecurity issues effectively with their existing LAN setup until they grow larger and face more complexity, which is why micro-segmentation becomes necessary. However, in Italy, it is not as well-known as in other markets due to the customer base.

I usually recommend Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for larger companies, as we started to work with Guardicore before the acquisition and then moved to distribute Akamai. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is not a simple solution for the Italian market because we are suffering from nanism; the majority of our companies have under 1,000 employees. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is enterprise software, but they are pretty good in that area.

Regarding their interface, I cannot answer on technical issues or aspects because I am the sales manager, and here we show the characteristics of the software, but we do not make any demonstration of the product because we are a distributor.

To become more competitive, I believe they have to work on technology knowledge and address the brand awareness issues for my market. In more consolidated markets such as the US or UK, where companies have several factories and thousands of employees, they could focus more on marketing the brand and the technologies.

I have been dealing with Akamai for three years overall.

No one has asked for more, so I find the technical support in my region is pretty good.

At the moment, I have no issues with documentation, integration with third-party solutions, or the initial setup; everything is pretty good, although you can always do more.

Concerning their pricing, it is not cheap, but it is reasonable with respect to the kind of market you have to face.

I think it is hard to say if it is the best option on the market at the moment because I do not know a lot of alternatives in that area. They appear to be the kind of solution that stands out; even though Guardicore is not as famous as CyberArk, they are pretty known for what they do.

My main use case for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is for big micro-segmentation at my company. A specific example of how I use micro-segmentation with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in my company is the segmentation of big broadcast domains, where with this I could segregate the front end, the back end, backup networks, and out-of-band networks for administration. I have many cases with jumper services also, so many cases that we could mention working with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation.

More than twenty ring-fences implemented with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation have produced significant results with a three-hundred-sixty-degree vision of all the network traffic including the biggest system that we hold today.

The best feature Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers is great threat intelligence. Threat intelligence stands out to me as a best feature of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation because you are ready, for example, for ransomware attacks and lateral movements. I am very happy with the solution.

In addition to threat intelligence, I have other ring-fences also. The way that Akamai Guardicore Segmentation holds the segmentation in the simplest way, giving the best visibility, is really the best thing for me.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has positively impacted my organization by improving security because it increased the perimeters and the breaks in small perimeters and also giving me visibility over three hundred sixty degrees over the network.

Since implementing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, I have seen specific outcomes such as reducing incidents because only the tight traffic is really allowed, so you reduce the possibilities of issues and also increase the security.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can be improved through the follow-up with the customer experience of the Guardicore team, and they gave me a lot of insights to improve the configuration. I say that we have everyday fine-tunings to increase the power of the tool. I am very happy with this.

I have been using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for three years and a half.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is very stable.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is very scalable because I could deploy anywhere without any hardware needs, for example.

The customer support for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is amazing. They are very close and help me all the time.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is my first solution.

I have seen a return on investment as it requires fewer employees needed.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is great. It has a fair cost for our business.

I did not evaluate other options.

My advice for others looking into using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is that it gives visibility, security, and really does the right segmentation of your broadcast domains, improving not only security but visibility that you really need for your business. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is the tool that makes me sleeping well every day, and I would rate it a ten on a scale of one to ten.